


Beyond the Stars

by livingbard



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst and Feels, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Multi, Spoilers for Season 3, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-07-08
Packaged: 2020-06-24 10:19:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19721692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livingbard/pseuds/livingbard
Summary: He misses his mom, and his dad, and his sisters, and his home. He misses his friends, his surrogate family, the people who have kept him going for so much longer than he ever expected to survive. And as Keith flies away, he takes the last piece of Lance with him.





	Beyond the Stars

“KEITH!” He shouts, flinging his arm out as if he can catch the lion flying away from him. He’s not sure if Keith can’t hear him or not, but he slams on Red’s controls to follow. She remains firmly grounded as the black lion gets further and further away, spiraling into the night until the only thing he can see are the stars scattered across the endless sky. Hopelessness smashes into him like a wave, he tumbles into confusion and hurt that always lie so close to the surface, ready to sweep him away at a second’s notice. 

He misses his mom, and his dad, and his sisters, and his home. He misses his friends, his surrogate family, the people who have kept him going for so much longer than he ever expected to survive. And as Keith flies away, he takes the last piece of Lance with him. 

He folds over the dark control panel, drawing his knees to his chest. He doesn’t feel anything, now. At the end of the chasm of despair is numbness, spreading through his body like ice, taking the searing pain and dulling it until he can’t even think anymore. It’s just him now. Just him and the Red Lion, stuck with its second-string pilot.

Time passes, but he isn’t sure how much. He’s not familiar with this wasteland of a planet, and he has no motivation to get out and learn. There’s no Coran to calculate the length of the day or Pidge or Matt to design shelter. There’s no Hunk to cook and no Allura to organize and no Shiro to plan and no Keith to-

_No._

It’s bad enough he’s trapped in Keith’s old lion, he doesn’t want to remember anything else about him. He doesn’t want to remember how he smiled when he thought no one was looking. He doesn’t want to remember how it felt to be held in his arms when he was hurt. He doesn’t want to remember Keith’s voice or his laugh or his stupid haircut. He doesn’t want to remember than Keith... left him. Alone. 

Red opens up her mouth after a while and spits him onto the ground. Lance rubs his aching hip and screams into the dark, but it doesn’t help. Of course it doesn’t. Now his throat hurts, and he has to be careful with his water rations if he wants to make it. 

Does he want to make it?

He shakes his head, irritated. Of course he does. Now that Red was working enough to forcefully eject him, he hoped that she was sending a signal out to the castle. 

If it was still there at all.

He shakes his head again. There’s no point in dwelling on what may or may not have happened in that last fight. If he starts thinking about it, he’s just going to get back around to the one thing he doesn’t want to think about. 

Okay. To be honest, there’s a lot he doesn’t want to think about. There’s probably more he doesn’t want to think about than things he wants to think about. Thinking about home hurts. Thinking about Voltron hurts more. Thinking about his situation isn’t working. He doesn’t even have Blue, he just has Red, and he knows without a doubt that Red wishes he was Keith.

Of course he can’t get around thinking about Keith. Every time he does, he sees the black lion flying away and it feels like a punch in the guts. Or a kick to the hip, he thinks, rubbing his side and glaring at Red.

His throat still hurts. He gets up and crawls back into the cockpit, fetching the emergency pack from his airtight cooler bag. He counts out the bottles of water, the packs of space goo, and arranges them into days. It’s pretty pointless, he knows exactly how much is in there, but anything is better than sitting and waiting. 

Anything is better than thinking. 

He opens one of the bottles and drinks, forcing himself to take small sips when he could have chugged the whole damn thing without a second thought. He forces himself to eat half a pack of goo, and then forces himself to pack the bag up and put it back. He pulls the hood of his jacket over his head and zips it up, crawling back into the pilot’s seat in an attempt to get some sleep. 

He could make camp, but he doesn’t know if this planet is inhabited by others and he doesn’t want to find out the hard way that he’s in some Galra-infested hellhole. At least if they find the lion, Red won’t let them in the cockpit.

He hopes. 

Sleep goes about as well as he expected it to. The pilot’s chair isn’t really made for sleep, and he can’t get comfortable. He knows that he could be in the biggest, softest, fluffiest bed and he still wouldn’t have slept well. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees the back of the black lion. Or his mom. Or Hunk. Or Pidge, Matt, Coran, Allura, Shiro. One of them. 

They’re either smiling and waving or screaming frantically. He doesn’t know which is worse. 

He refuses to think about Keith.

Lance isn’t good at wallowing, especially when no one is around to wallow in front of. The next time it’s light outside, he ventures beyond the lion to examine the planet he’s stuck on, not letting Red out of his sight. He can’t shake the nagging voice in the back of his head that’s convinced that Red would leave him, too.

Lance has had that nagging voice in his head his entire life, and calls it Dolor, worthy of the capital letter. For the most part he ignores it. His father had told him that it was a mischievous spirit trying to trick him into worrying about what he couldn’t control so that he wouldn’t remember to focus on what he could control instead. 

Lance has had a hard time focusing on one task for as long as he could remember. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is what the Garrison's doctors said when he’d enrolled, although the diagnosis is something he still thinks of as an “other people” thing. When he was a kid, his mother told him that his brain was thinking too fast for his body to keep up with. That’s how she explained his constant energy and his need to move, to bounce his leg up and down or to tap his desk with his pencil or dash from one thing to the next, never settling down. He still thinks about it that way.

In school, it made it hard to listen to lecture and focus for hours as teachers went on and on about math formulas and physics. When flying, it helped him take in a vast swath of visual and auditory information very quickly with little need to actively process before he could respond. 

Right now, he thinks it’s helping him take in and process his landscape.

The place is red. Red like Mars, red like his lion, red like Kei-. He bites down on his cheek hard enough to draw blood and swears. Red like blood. Not like him.

Red, check. Clay, check. Dust, check. He frowns. This planet is reminding him a lot of Mars, which would be fine... if Mars were habitable for humans without significant modifications. It’s not. 

The sky is grey, and he notes the cloud cover. He wonders if the clouds are jamming Red’s signal and hiding him from the rest of the team, and he wishes he hadn’t thought about that.

The landscape is fairly rocky, with hills and mountains he can see not too far from here. If there’s life, he bets it’s somewhere near the mountains. Mountains have caves, and caves=safe. 

“Okay girl.” He says, just to hear a voice, even if it is his own. “Will you walk for me?” Red seems to think about it before shifting onto all fours, ready to follow. Lance has a feeling that if he gets inside and tries to fly away, he’ll have another two days of silent treatment, so he doesn’t push his luck. 

They make it to the closest mountain before it gets dark. His legs hurt and he’s coated in sweat and he thinks gravity is much more intense here than it was at home.

The castle flashes in his mind and he shakes his head, frowning. Home wasn’t a castle in space. Home was sandy beaches and hot days and colorful paintings and music. Home was people in and out all day chatting loudly and laughing louder. Home was children underfoot and yelling parents and soccer in the dirt lot and ice pops for later while the sun set. Home was his mom hugging him when he came to visit and a bike with a rusted chain and a sibling perched on the handlebars and no helmets or knee pads just scars and scabs and an endless summer stretching into infinity.

An infinity that currently included a grey and red landscape with dust in his throat and a large magical space lion robot that was also sometimes a giant robot’s arm. 

Voltron. They need me. Well, they need Red.

“You’re being difficult.” He says. “You’re walking, so I know you’re fine. You just won’t let me in, which is going to be a problem if the Galra show up. They’ll put you back in a bubble on a spaceship somewhere. Do you want to be bubbled again?”

Red is unresponsive. 

Lance sighs. “You know, you’re really not being helpful. I know you’re listening to me, and I know you’re ignoring me, and somehow the fact that you’re a giant robot lion makes that even worse. I am literally the only person around and you’re still ignoring me.” 

Lance doesn’t like silence unless he’s sleeping. It just feels unnatural. He’s from a place where you shouted your normal conversations and whispering was only for secrets and maybe dramatic affect. He knows the lions don’t talk, he’s not that far gone, but he can always tell when they’re listening and responding. He can feel it.

He can’t feel anything now. 

He finds a decently-sized stream flowing out of the mountains and, in what’s possibly the stupidest decision he’ll make today, hesitantly tastes it. 

He pumps his fist into the air. “We’ve got water!” He cheers. It’s one less problem to worry about, and he’s got plenty as is. 

He pulls out his filter bottle from his bag and impatiently paces as it runs the water through. When he checks the filter, he’s relieved to notice that there’s just some small rocks. The water is pretty clear in the stream, he figures he’d be okay to drink it without the filter if he gets desperate. For now, he decides to follow the stream up into the mountains. No sense in wasting a perfectly good water resource. 

He tracks it up to a cave long after it’s dark outside. Red barely fits in the cave mouth, but ends up doubling as a sentry and a door so Lance doesn’t mind. He risks a fire as his teeth start to chatter and he’s pleased to discover that the weird plant matter growing next to the stream burns nicely when he puts some flint to it. 

He fashions a torch out of some more gnarled bark and looks around the cave. He can’t see the back of it. “I’m gonna go check it out, don’t abandon me.” He tells Red, more out of habit than anything else. 

He starts following the stream, hoping it’s not full of some carnivores. Because he’s seen movies, he makes sure that it is, in fact, a cave and not some giant monster’s mouth. There are no teeth-shaped rocks at the entrance and the floor is very solid and dirt-like, so he feels pretty good about his odds. 

He’s beyond pleased when he finds a small waterfall flowing down the rocks and collecting in a shallow pool before flowing into his stream. The water’s cold at best, but he feels better knowing he can collect some water to boil over the fire. He’s pretty sure his helmet won’t melt and he can cook or spot-clean himself as needed. 

He holds the torch higher and looks past the waterfall. He’s in a cavern, with passages branching off in different directions. Almost all of them dead-end into more cave wall or a pile of rocks and rubble. One he follows for as long as he dares before retreating back. He doesn’t see any signs of life at all, or signs of anything other than rock.

He sets a trip wire at the entrance of that passage so he’ll know if anything tries to come through. With Red at his side, he’s not too worried- presuming that she’ll let him in if he’s in danger.

He could feasibly stay here for now, until his food begins to run out. He’s got 7 days’ worth of goo, more if he doesn’t mind being hungry. If he can get Red to open up, he might be able to see if the distress signal was picked up by his friends. His chest aches at the thought of his friends. 

He shakes his head and bites his lip, hands on his hips. He can’t wallow in self-pity, he doesn’t have that luxury. His best bet is getting into Red and seeing if his distress signal made it out to the cosmos. 

He really, really hopes it did.

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this over a year ago and I kind of just left it chilling for a bit. I'm excited to get back to writing again! I hope y'all enjoy. This chronologically takes place in another timeline because I never got around to finishing the last couple of seasons. Thanks for reading!


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